Archive for October 2006

I’ve finished the schema for nspectre configuration files. It should be available in the next version of nspectre. In doing so, I’ve made a few changes to the format. Nothing major. I’ve also written an XSL so that you can transform any existing configuration files from the old format to the new format. Before it can be released, I need to add the schema to the configuration readers so that they can check the validity of configuration files.

The new version of nspectre (did I mention that you can get it here?) contains a console application called, after some considerable thought, NSpectre.Console. The purpose of this application is to provide the means to process an nspectre configuration file without having to write any code. It’s fairly simple to use. Open a command prompt in the folder where any required dlls (required in order to process the configuration file) are located (this is usually the bin directory of the project whose nspectre configuration file you want to process) and call NSpectre.Console (if you haven’t added the path to NSpectre.Console to your system path variable, then you’ll need the full path.) NSpectre.Console takes the following switches:

-config used to specify the configuration file

-logOutput used to indicate whether or not to output a log file. The logger will be set to Debug level output.

-logFile the name of the output file (the default is Output.log in the current folder.)

If you wanted a log file with the default name, the command would look like this:

NSpectre.Console -config “Your config file” -logOutput

It’s worth noting that the current version of NSpectre.Console only supports version 0.8.1 of nspectre.

The next release of nspectre is imminent. This release will have 2 new features. The first feaure, courtesy of Al, allows grouping of specifications. This is achieved by a new optional attribute (“key”) on the specification. The ValidationErrors collection has a new method allowing you to get all errors for a given key. An example use of this new feature is to populate controls in the UI informing the user of why the data entered is not valid.
The second feature is a console app (NSpectre.Console) that allows you to test a given NSpectre configuration file. Debug level output can be sent to an output log to see all the details of processing the configuration file. Hopefully, this will save a few valuable development seconds.
I’ll post a little more detail on these features when the release is available. If you have a feature request for NSpectre, let us know here.

A few days ago, I wanted to generate an XML file from an XSD using the WebTools Platform for Eclipse. It turns out to be easy. Right click on the xsd file and choose Generate > XML file… There are options about optional elements and attributes and choices. What more could you ask for?